12 January 2006

Taiwanese scientists have created pigs that glow green in the dark by injecting a protein extracted from jelly fish into the nucleus of three male pig embryos. How long will it be before someone creates humans that glow different colors in the dark? I suppose such enhancements could be given to kids destined for neighborhoods with high accident rates.

A point of clarication. They don't really glow, they fluoresce. You have to shine a blue light on them and THEN they will glow.

there is a bunny that glows... he's famous. his name is ALBA.

Voyeur here is why...

scientist often need cells to experiment on. My own research for example I use cells that continue to grow and devide as long as i feed them. If these cells have a protein i want to study then i have an infinite supply of cells with that protein.

Now pig cells can be very much like human cells in some cases so its a good model. the proteins that glow are called "fluorescent protein" the first was called GFP "Green fluorescent protein"

so why do we need it. we can attach the gene for the GFP to the protein that we are studying. Then when the cell produces the protein now fluoreses an we can visualize or see it.